There's no such thing as a mindreader in humanity, particularly not when it comes to emotions. We'd like to think people will just know, but they can't know jack shit until long learning has gone by, and even then it's patently unfair to expect anyone to just know how you feel.

There's a lot of magic and romanticism in that sort of thinking, in wanting people to just 'get it'. And it's all very pretty and pat and neat and lovely, but it's unrealistic. It's hard for us to let go of that romanticism, and embrace the realism, because society has taught us to buy into myths rather than truths.

There's no harm in saying, for example, that you hang out with someone because you like the attention you get, or because you need something they have. The problem is that no one is used to being upfront about their motives, sometimes not even to themselves. There's nothing wrong with seemingly selfish ones, only with lying about them, and not taking the other person's needs and wants into account. We lie about them because it's not 'nice' to be selfish.

We're so god damned used to shoving things into boxes of 'good', 'bad', 'ugly', 'nice'... that we've completely lost sight of the fact that a lot of those things just are, they aren't something.